When I was junior in high school, I remember having my first experience with using the internet to learn Science. I was taking a physics course and a part of our grade each week came through the completion of a set of online problems through a university (The University of Texas? My memory fails at this point). The problems were a mixture of things we had studied and things we hadn’t yet reached. Each problem awarded top points for a correct answer on the first try, or decreasing points for each attempt at the right answer. Every student got the same problems, but the numbers would be changed in each problem so that answers couldn’t be shared. We would all sit together in study halls and try to figure out the problems together, reveling in the process and each taking turns to try answers so that no one person took all the hits on their points. It was a challenge both to figure out the answers as well as to know when to quit so that you wouldn’t lose too many points.

The biggest triumph that I remember, though, comes from when I was stuck on a problem about computing the distance of a planet from the sun, so I searched the actual answer and then set up a proportion to the numbers given in the question. I got the right answer (and was the only one in the class that did!), yet still had NO idea how to actually solve the problem. The teacher sniffed me out in an instant. He praised me for thinking out of the box and then showed us all the missing step that we needed.